I haven’t had much time to publish lately but I could not resist posting this.
I recently had been wondering about the availability of WorldCup 2006 games on the Internet. I seemed pretty obvious to me that the games would be available through Bittorrent considering the very high interest it generates in the worldwide community. While looking around for recent matches, I quickly realized that not only were they available for download but also as live streams. And it’s amazing how well it works.
I ‘m currently watching the first half of the French-Portugal semi-finals live (1-0 right now). It simply works. I have a very good quality reception with constant 420kbps. I don’t know much about the technical details but the player I’m using is called TvAnts and is based on peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming. Installation details can be found here. There actually seems to be many technical solutions for P2P streaming already. I’ll be looking into that later on.
Although these re-transmission of commercial channels are probably not quite compliant with the FIFA terms, this clearly shows that the Internet infrastructure, when used adequately (P2P here), can already support large scale distribution of traditionally broadcast events.
Tags: peer-to-peer+streaming, worldcup, TvAnts, broadcast+event, TV, internet+tv, Internet+streaming
